Listen to My Body: Does Making Friends Help Influence People?

We investigate the effect of relational dialogue on creating rapport and exerting social influence in human-robot conversation, by comparing interactions with and without a relational component, and with different agent types. Human participants interact with two agents — a Nao robot and a virtual human — in four dialogue scenarios: one involving building familiarity, and three involving sharing information and persuasion in item-ranking tasks. Results show that both agents influence human decision-making; people prefer interacting with the robot, feel higher rapport with the robot, and believe the robot has more influence; and that objective influence of the agent on the person is increased by building familiarity, but is not significantly different between the agents.